Getting a squad to quickly move to a position is not very hard anymore, just CITY GUARD SQUAD <squad> STANDGUARD will get that squad to come to you pretty quickly. Of course, you have to be part of security for that.

Right now, guards blocking movement isn't that big of a deal. I need a guard clot big enough so that corpserushing it becomes a major and unpleasant task, which means I need enough guards to just kill you outright. It might help make corpserushing slightly more lethal, but it's called corpserushing because it's waves of suicide attacks.

Healing is nice, I like healing because it can help offset a corpserush if the timing is right and it gets healed at some point in the attacks.

Afflictions and special attacks are basically worthless at the moment due to the nature of guards. My smallest clot will have enough guards to instantly kill you and so it doesn't matter if the guards break your legs, too.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Okay, I am starting into some new guard types while I think about that. I am thinking about:

A type that blocks enemies from leaving a room with a shield of some sort.

A healer that heals guards and players.

Upgrading some of the weaker guards types to do some special attacks. Break limbs, knock prone, etc. This will increase their cost of course.

I am also going to bump the base levels and health.

Thoughts?

Special attacks for guards should stay away from non-hindering afflictions, or really, any affliction. Thinking outside the box - splash damage, for instance - would be cool. What if we made a 'saboteur' (not the class) guard whose purpose was to attack the enemy's defenses? For Khandava/Stavenn, as an example, 'a tattooed wytch' - it fiddles with things like the damage resistance of several enemies, maybe throws out hinders to present city enemies in the form of stuns or something. Basically, I'm proposing a specialist guard whose purpose is making other guards do their job better somehow.

Message #2062 Sent By: (imperian) Received On: 1/20/2018/2:59"Antioch has filed a bounty against you. Reason: Raiding Antioch and stealing Bina, being a rightass, and not belonging anywhere near Antioch till he grows up."

Am I the only one that looks at this and sees that the solution should be to make it so guards are not raid/griefing objectives.

Most, if not all, of the issues would be resolved if killing of guards was not a resource drain on the city. In my mind, there are a couple of ways this could be achieved while still maintaining the Admin's desired function of the guards being somewhat of a resource drain on the cities/councils.

Option 1: Make guards invincible. Keep costs the same for hiring/upgrading guards (or maybe only make upgraded guards). Convert the guard replacement costs to a monthly upkeep costs like the archers/telepaths, perhaps 10,000/month for the all the regular guards a city has.

Pros - End to corpserushing/griefing. Guards maintain the resource drain and it applies to all cities, not just the flavor of the month taking the beating (Antioch currently). Still requires active defense to be effective. Would allow for splitting of the guards into smaller functional units without exposing yourself to vulnerabilities (therefore, end of cities locking away or clotting all their guards). Would prevent continually ongoing raids.

Cons - May need to reduce the number of guards such that they could not be spread out in such a way that would prevent any raiding.

Option 2: Leave guards killable but automatically respawning after X hours (6 maybe as a start) or until someone with security privileges restores them. No cost to respawn them however. Again, add a monthly upkeep 10,000/month. Perhaps there could also be a fee (50,000 gold per use) to respawn the guards before the timer.

Pros - All of the benefits of Option 1 except that there would end up being a functional limit on how small you could make the clots. Raiders could still attack and kill off guards to shut down city defenses in a local area or whole city; however, the griefing mechanic draining reserves uncontrollably would be gone. Raiding as is would be essentially unchanged.

Cons - I'm not sure I really see any, but I'm sure someone will.

I think I prefer Option 2; however, I'm not sure if @Jeremy is willing to consider either.

However, my main problem right now is dealing with calling for help. It may be just best to remove that option all together. I am not sure there will be a way to get guards to react well.

Also, I hate that this makes sense now, but not when I initially pointed it out as a issue/abuse mechanic. At the time, it was specifically embraced as a valid raid mechanic. Perhaps this is the wrong thread.

Mishandling your guards and your security SHOULD leave you open to taking big losses. This adds an element of skill to defense. If you slap guards around unsupported in ineffective squad arrangements or leave 5 guards going on remote patrols outside of CALL FOR HELP range, you deserve to lose them.

The problem here is that there's no such thing an effective defense because guards are so weak that they need to be in clots of 50+ to be effective and they're so fragile that they're highly susceptible to graveyard zerging. Fixing those problems should be more than sufficient to keep your city AND city guards safe at the same time, provided that you don't set them up like an idiot.

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

I don't think that ordering a squad to 'standguard' in your room is a good replacement for 'call for help' for two reasons. First, because it's not available to everyone in the Council, and secondly, because the squad moves significantly more slowly if you tell them to standguard as opposed to calling for help.

Mechanically, I think that 'call for help' should probably only move entire squads at once instead of individual members separately, and either summon every squad within X rooms or only the nearest eligible squad. In case the squad is currently busy fighting an enemy or happens upon an enemy on their way to the call, the squad could only move if none of its members were currently in combat.

The archer/telepath ticks are so slow and so weak that I'm really not that impressed by the system at the moment. The attacks seem to cap out at ~35% of my max health, which sounds high, but they're so slow that they never reach a point where I can't handle it with just health elixir and regen. Alone, this system will never reach a point that drives me out of the city, and I'd feel comfortable raiding in a group with this level of damage, because most of the times we'd be raiding we won't be facing a fair fight; if the numbers were fair, we wouldn't be raiding, because a fair fight in an enemy city is almost always a losing proposition what with guard rushing..

I consider this to be a major flaw of the system; the entire reason I wanted a system like this in the first place is to place a sort of hard enrage on raids. This type of system wouldn't have stopped the Kinsarmar raids, for example. Guards were always in such numbers that no amount of extra damage would be meaningful, and the archer/telepath ticks aren't enough to have made a difference in how the fights went because the defenders were so heavily outclassed. Right now, I look at this system and my general gut instinct is "this is not worth 20k/day, I'd rather save the money and have it available for extra guards in the event of a raid, because this system won't actually stop a raid."

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

Okay, so we have a few more things we talked about doing with guards, but I think we are going to hold off for a bit and see what these changes do to raiding and clotting. We will fix any bugs that you find, so feel free to post those here.

Only Kinsarmar and Khandava have sent in descriptions for their healers and blockers. We will be doing a little event soon for those two cities so they can start placing them.

Sorry to bring this up again, but is there something that will prevent guards from instant-attacking?

There are 13 elite smoldering treants here. There are 6 elite smoldering treants here. The ever-shifting visage of Brishi, Aspect of Moradeim, is here.

The guards rushed to him, but did not instantly attack. Does the enemy is in room only fire instantly on room enter? Is there anyway we could get a check for "guard enters room" Is there an enemy here? Attack instantly. (He was a monk and was not masked.)

Also, additionally. Do archer guard types tentacle on in-room flight? Or will they tentacle someone who has not been in their room but flies above them?

There is totally a check for guard enters room. When I rush Septus it looks something like

<prompt>"Yes, Khizan, we will do that immediately."*squad moves west*Septus has been slain by guards.<prompt>

"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."

The tentacle works like the insta attack. If they fly into the room, and the archer is not already in a fight, the will insta tentacle. If they fly up, the archer will tentacle on their next normal attack.